Thursday, May 15, 2014

The Articulate Totality

The Pangrammaticon as such (from which this blog merely borrows its name) is the articulate totality, all the usage in the world. It is the fact (which is also an act) that commands can be as articulate as statements, that our desires are as articulated as our beliefs, that for every formulation of knowledge, like "science is the theory of the real" there is an equally articulate formulation of power, like "politics is the practice of the ideal". Its utility lies in getting us to experience more precisely the correspondences between what we see about us and what we do about it.

I don't mean "articulation" in the sense of expressing something in language but in the sense of being "jointed", i.e., having distinct but connected parts. That's of course the basis of being expressible in language, but it's not the same thing. To the trained art-ist, experience is immediately articulate, and the experience of this articulateness is conveyed in the work of art, so that the reader/viewers experience may gain in articulateness.

Articulation does make up for a loss, either. It is a gain in its own right, a kind of human progress, when it occurs. In life, as individuals, we reach a kind of maximum articulation sometime in adulthood, and then fall back into inarticulate babbling as we get old. As a species, I'm not sure if we're still progressing. Maybe there is a rise and fall of articulateness that follows the rise of and fall of civilizations. (Chris Hedges seems to be convinced that we are losing our minds.)